Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Slippery Beast is a fascinating account of a deeply mysterious creature—the eel—a thrilling saga of true crime, natural history, travel, and big business. What is it about eels? Depending on who you ask, they are a pest, a fascination, a threat, a pot of gold. What they are not is predictable. Eels emerged some 200 million years ago, weathered mass extinctions and continental shifts, and were once among the world’s most abundant freshwater fish. But since the 1970s, their numbers have plummeted. Because eels—as unagi—are another thing: delicious. In Slippery Beast, journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell travels in the world of “eel people,” pursuing a burgeoning fascination with this mysterious and highly coveted creature. Despite centuries of study by celebrated thinkers from Aristotle to Leeuwenhoek to a young Sigmund Freud, much about eels remains unknown, including exactly how eels beget other eels. Eels cannot be bred reliably in captivity, and as a result, infant eels are unbelievably valuable. A pound of the tiny, translucent, bug-eyed “elvers” caught in the cold fresh waters of Maine can command $3,000 or more on the black market. Illegal trade in eels is an international scandal measured in billions of dollars every year. In Maine, federal investigators have risked their lives to bust poaching rings, including the notorious half-decade-long “Operation Broken Glass.” Ruppel Shell follows the elusive eel from Maine to the Sargasso Sea and back, stalking riversides, fishing holes, laboratories, restaurants, courtrooms, and America’s first commercial eel “family farm,” which just might upend the international market and save a state. This is an enthralling, globe-spanning look at an animal that you may never come to love, but which will never fail to astonish you, a miraculous creature that tells more about us than we can ever know about it.
Bernath Beatrice's Art represents a blatant and loud talking, declares its presence as a social and personal truth, not for decoration value, and was reflected in recent years in Israel and galleries overseas, particularly in Berlin, as called SOCIAL ART and sometimes INHOSPITABLE ART. This Art raises social and personal pain, the right to be different, to love who they want, the urban loneliness and so, it is uncomfortable to talk about, but, it turns out, that most artists are tired to hide important issues and use art to point them out, and young people identify with this clean direct art, that speaks for them. Beatrice Bernath about her art: frying schnitzels - lazy housewife, artist who no longer has the patience to cook complicated dishes. I twist in my head different methods for the public presentation of my written words - I was told it'll be open scene - I say it'll be action for sure, more cliché than that is not possible: the housewife turned poet with artistic desires planning the world's "Existential Nonsenses breaking in public fragments of her inner life. Today I feel your awareness in my melodrama "Utopia my love" you are an universal mockery of my theater and a less gentle picture waiting for that evil Godot who is never coming because he is already in my bed. "My Decameron" was born deep in me and it can be you again and again, they are all versions of that strange stranger that tried to enter my life. I will speak my verse eye to eye with the audience I will do it with a bow for you to know: it's a show. In "Nude" I present on the tray a naked soul. What is the value from a literary and deepness point of view if I touch only a single string from the audience? who cut the hair from your nose, who does she dream about when she washes your underwear named childishly shpile-hose will you recognize my wicked smile in my sarcastic poems? Life is an everyday's kitsch but poetry with the moon stars and my tears- they are the Utopia of my refuge. And who will draw the line who has the right of the delimitation among the hilarious reality observed by the subconscious that screams shit and loves silly falling ghowkly between the lines? Although I'm afraid of being exposed, I provoke the public bravely, I read my obsolete thoughts endlessly with immeasurable thirst of love, my upsets disguised in a sarcastic parody are talking to "a Fish on the plate" and I will be face to face with you, anonymously but intimate from my two-sided mirror.
This carefully crafted ebook: “A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, From the Earth to the Moon, The Mysterious Island & Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea” is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Writing in France in the nineteenth century, Jules Verne was fascinated by adventure and exploration. Collecting "A Journey to the Center of the Earth", "Around the World in 80 Days", "From the Earth to the Moon", "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" and "The Mysterious Island", this omnibus offers a unique compilation of five of Verne's Voyages, stories in which he extrapolated developing technology and invention into marvellous fiction. This volume offers readers a generous introduction to Jules Verne, whose books are as alive today as they were for readers new to the ideas expressed in them during his time. Jules Gabriel Verne (1828 – 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction.
DigiCat presents to you this carefully created volume of "THE ESSENTIAL JULES VERNE: 29 Greatest Sci-Fi & Adventure Books in One Edition". This ebook has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Contents: Five Weeks In A Balloon - 1863 A Journey To The Center Of The Earth - 1864 The Adventures Of Captain Hatteras - 1864 From The Earth To The Moon - 1865 In Search Of The Castaways - 1865 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea - 1869 Around The Moon - 1869 Around The World In Eighty Days - 1872 The Fur Country - 1872 The Mysterious Island - 1874 The Survivors Of The Chancellor - 1874 Michael Strogoff - 1876 Off On A Comet - 1877 The Underground City (or The Child of the Cavern) - 1877 Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen - 1878 Eight Hundred Leagues On The Amazon - 1881 Godfrey Morgan - 1882 Robur The Conqueror - 1886 The Purchase of the North Pole (or Topsy-Turvy) - 1889 The Adventures Of A Special Correspondent (or Claudius Bombarnac) - 1893 Facing The Flag - 1896 An Antarctic Mystery - 1897 The Master Of The World - 1904 Novellas & Stories: A Voyage In A Balloon (Or A Drama In The Air) - 1851 Master Zacharius Or The Clockmaker Who Lost His Soul - 1854 A Winter Amid The Ice - 1855 The Blockade Runners - 1871 Doctor Ox's Experiment (Or A Fantasy Of Dr Ox) - 1872 In The Year 2889 - 1889 ules Verne (1828-1905) was a French novelist who pioneered the genre of science fiction. A true visionary with an extraordinary talent for writing adventure stories, his writings incorporated the latest scientific knowledge of his day and envisioned technological developments that were years ahead of their time. Verne wrote about undersea, air, and space travel long before any navigable or practical craft were invented. Verne wrote over 50 novels and numerous short stories.
“The deepest parts of the ocean are totally unknown to us,” admits Professor Aronnax early in this novel. “What goes on in those distant depths? What creatures inhabit, or could inhabit, those regions twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the water? It’s almost beyond conjecture.” Jules Verne (1828-1905) published the French equivalents of these words in 1869, and little has changed since. 126 years later, a Time cover story on deep-sea exploration made much the same admission: “We know more about Mars than we know about the oceans.” This reality begins to explain the dark power and otherworldly fascination of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Born in the French river town of Nantes, Verne had a lifelong passion for the sea. First as a Paris stockbroker, later as a celebrated author and yachtsman, he went on frequent voyages — to Britain, America, the Mediterranean. But the specific stimulus for this novel was an 1865 fan letter from a fellow writer, Madame George Sand. She praised Verne’s two early novels Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), then added: “Soon I hope you’ll take us into the ocean depths, your characters traveling in diving equipment perfected by your science and your imagination.” Thus inspired, Verne created one of literature’s great rebels, a freedom fighter who plunged beneath the waves to wage a unique form of guerilla warfare. Initially, Verne’s narrative was influenced by the 1863 uprising of Poland against Tsarist Russia. The Poles were quashed with a violence that appalled not only Verne but all Europe. As originally conceived, Verne’s Captain Nemo was a Polish nobleman whose entire family had been slaughtered by Russian troops. Nemo builds a fabulous futuristic submarine, the Nautilus, then conducts an underwater campaign of vengeance against his imperialist oppressor. But in the 1860s France had to treat the Tsar as an ally, and Verne’s publisher Pierre Hetzel pronounced the book unprintable. Verne reworked its political content, devising new nationalities for Nemo and his great enemy — information revealed only in a later novel, The Mysterious Island (1875); in the present work Nemo’s background remains a dark secret. In all, the novel had a difficult gestation. Verne and Hetzel were in constant conflict and the book went through multiple drafts, struggles reflected in its several working titles over the period 1865-69: early on, it was variously called Voyage Under the Waters, Twenty-five Thousand Leagues Under the Waters, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Waters, and A Thousand Leagues Under the Oceans. Verne is often dubbed, in Isaac Asimov’s phrase, “the world’s first science-fiction writer.” And it’s true, many of his sixty-odd books do anticipate future events and technologies: From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Hector Servadac (1877) deal in space travel, while Journey to the Center of the Earth features travel to the earth’s core. But with Verne the operative word is “travel,” and some of his best-known titles don’t really qualify as sci-fi: Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) and Michael Strogoff (1876) are closer to “travelogs” — adventure yarns in far-away places. These observations partly apply here. The subtitle of the present book is An Underwater Tour of the World, so in good travelog style, the Nautilus’s exploits supply an episodic story line. Shark attacks, giant squid, cannibals, hurricanes, whale hunts, and other rip-roaring adventures erupt almost at random. Yet this loose structure gives the novel an air of documentary realism. What’s more, Verne adds backbone to the action by developing three recurring motifs: the deepening mystery of Nemo’s past life and future intentions, the mounting tension between Nemo and hot-tempered harpooner Ned Land, and Ned’s ongoing schemes to escape from the Nautilus. These unifying threads tighten the narrative and accelerate its momentum. Other subtleties occur inside each episode, the textures sparkling with wit, information, and insight. Verne regards the sea from many angles: in the domain of marine biology, he gives us thumbnail sketches of fish, seashells, coral, sometimes in great catalogs that swirl past like musical cascades; in the realm of geology, he studies volcanoes literally inside and out; in the world of commerce, he celebrates the high-energy entrepreneurs who lay the Atlantic Cable or dig the Suez Canal. And Verne’s marine engineering proves especially authoritative. His specifications for an open-sea submarine and a self-contained diving suit were decades before their time, yet modern technology bears them out triumphantly. True, today’s scientists know a few things he didn’t: the South Pole isn’t at the water’s edge but far inland; sharks don’t flip over before attacking; giant squid sport ten tentacles not eight; sperm whales don’t prey on their whalebone cousins. This notwithstanding, Verne furnishes the most evocative portrayal of the ocean depths before the arrival of Jacques Cousteau and technicolor film. Lastly the book has stature as a novel of character. Even the supporting cast is shrewdly drawn: Professor Aronnax, the career scientist caught in an ethical conflict; Conseil, the compulsive classifier who supplies humorous tag lines for Verne’s fast facts; the harpooner Ned Land, a creature of constant appetites, man as heroic animal. But much of the novel’s brooding power comes from Captain Nemo. Inventor, musician, Renaissance genius, he’s a trail-blazing creation, the prototype not only for countless renegade scientists in popular fiction, but even for such varied figures as Sherlock Holmes or Wolf Larsen. However, Verne gives his hero’s brilliance and benevolence a dark underside — the man’s obsessive hate for his old enemy. This compulsion leads Nemo into ugly contradictions: he’s a fighter for freedom, yet all who board his ship are imprisoned there for good; he works to save lives, both human and animal, yet he himself creates a holocaust; he detests imperialism, yet he lays personal claim to the South Pole. And in this last action he falls into the classic sin of Pride. He’s swiftly punished. The Nautilus nearly perishes in the Antarctic and Nemo sinks into a growing depression. Like Shakespeare’s King Lear he courts death and madness in a great storm, then commits mass murder, collapses in catatonic paralysis, and suicidally runs his ship into the ocean’s most dangerous whirlpool. Hate swallows him whole. For many, then, this book has been a source of fascination, surely one of the most influential novels ever written, an inspiration for such scientists and discoverers as engineer Simon Lake, oceanographer William Beebe, polar traveler Sir Ernest Shackleton. Likewise Dr. Robert D. Ballard, finder of the sunken Titanic, confesses that this was his favorite book as a teenager, and Cousteau himself, most renowned of marine explorers, called it his shipboard bible. The present translation is a faithful yet communicative rendering of the original French texts published in Paris by J. Hetzel et Cie. — the hardcover first edition issued in the autumn of 1871, collated with the softcover editions of the First and Second Parts issued separately in the autumn of 1869 and the summer of 1870. Although prior English versions have often been heavily abridged, this new translation is complete to the smallest substantive detail. Because, as that Time cover story suggests, we still haven’t caught up with Verne. Even in our era of satellite dishes and video games, the seas keep their secrets. We’ve seen progress in sonar, torpedoes, and other belligerent machinery, but sailors and scientists — to say nothing of tourists — have yet to voyage in a submarine with the luxury and efficiency of the Nautilus...FROM THE BOOKS.
The Collected Works of Jules Verne is a remarkable compilation of some of the most visionary and influential works of science fiction in literary history. Jules Verne's captivating storytelling, vivid imagination, and meticulous attention to detail in works like 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' and 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' continue to captivate readers with their adventurous spirit and exploration of the unknown. Verne's ability to blend scientific accuracy with fantastical elements set him apart as a pioneer in the sci-fi genre, inspiring generations of writers and readers. This collection serves as a testament to Verne's enduring legacy and his unmatched ability to transport readers to new and exciting worlds with every turn of the page. Jules Verne's life as a visionary writer was no doubt influenced by his own curiosity and fascination with the advancements of the 19th century, including new technologies and discoveries. His desire to push boundaries and challenge conventional thinking is evident in his works, as he delves into themes of exploration, adventure, and the limitless possibilities of the human imagination. For fans of science fiction and adventure literature, The Collected Works of Jules Verne is a must-read that will engage the mind and spark the imagination, offering a glimpse into the genius of one of the greatest literary minds of the 19th century.
This Excellent Collection brings together Jules Verne's longer, major books and a fine selection of shorter pieces and Science-Fiction Books. These Books created and collected in Jules Verne's Most important Works illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of the XX century - a man who elevated political writing to an art. Jules Verne (1828Ŕ1905) was a French writer. He was one of the first authors to write science fiction. Some of his books include Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Jules Verne has earned a place in the history of literature as one of the most important writers of adventure novels of recent history. But his novels contain more than just entertainment. Their pages contain hidden scientific data, descriptions of inventions and, above all, a love of technological innovations and the progress of humanity. From his perspective as a nineteenth-century man, Verne shocked the world will tales of gadgets and vehicles that, years later, would eventually take shape outside fiction, just as Isaac Asimov did years later. His influence has been such that it has come to serve as an inspiration to an entire cultural and aesthetic movement. This Collection included: 1. Five Weeks in a Balloon 2. The Adventures of Captain Hatteras 3. A Journey into the Center of the Earth 4. From the Earth to the Moon 5. Around the Moon 6. In Search of the Castaways 7. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea 8. A Floating City 9. The Fur Country 10. Around the World in Eighty Days 11. The Mysterious Island 12. The Survivors of the Chancellor 13. Michael Strogoff, or the Courier of the Czar 14. Off on a Comet 15. The Underground City, or the Child of the Cavern 16. Dick Sand, a Captain at Fifteen 17. The Begum's Millions 18. Tribulations of a Chinaman in China 19. The Steam House 20. Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon 21. Godfrey Morgan 22. The Green Ray 23. Kéraban the Inflexible 24. The Vanished Diamond 25. The Archipelago on Fire 26. Mathias Sandorf 27. The Lottery Ticket 28. Robur the Conqueror 29. Texar's Revenge, or, North Against South 30. The Flight to France 31. Two Years' Vacation 32. Family Without a Name 33. The Purchase of the North Pole, or Topsy-Turvy 34. César Cascabel 35. Mistress Branican 36. Carpathian Castle 37. Claudius Bombarnac 38. Foundling Mick 39. Captain Antifer 40. Propeller Island 41. Facing the Flag 42. Clovis Dardentor 43. An Antarctic Mystery 44. The Will of an Eccentric 45. Master of the World
